It can be an enjoyable experience to learn something new when you plan for it! In yesterday’s post, we explored the idea of staying in and learning from the built-in tutorials on the PFAFF performance icon. In today’s post, we’ll explore one of the exclusive features on PFAFF machines – the Stitch Creator Program.
In the Stitch Creator program, not only can you edit and change many of the built-in stitches, you can also create your own. The wide needle range of the performance icon means you can design stitches up to 9mm wide. The large multi-touch screen makes it easy to see all the edit options and functions you can use within the program to move around and edit a stitch.
I’m still far from designing my own stitches, but even after this bit of exploring, I was already thinking about what I might want to make. To start, I inserted a stitch and then added some words to go with it. I love the animal stitches included on the performance icon and thought it would be fun to play a bit with the turtle. At first, I just added words between turtles and realized I could do more – I needed to think beyond what was already there. I decided to emphasize the turtles by using the triple stitch button; the turtles would be stitched three times and the words in between only once.
I tried a few things and then noticed on the multi-touch screen I had put two ‘e’s in my project and one was capitalized; I needed to fix this! When I pressed on the screen for a few seconds – a long touch – a menu popped up giving me the option to edit in Stitch Creator. The photo below is from when I first found this feature – notice it’s all turtles! At this point, I added the triple stitching and then the words.
In this program, I was able to highlight and edit stitches. At first, all the stitches were highlighted green. After pressing the top icon, the highlight went away. I scrolled the screen down so I could get to the last stitch on the capital E. I touched the garbage can icon to ‘trash’ each stitch. I pressed until I could see on the screen that all of the stitches for the capital E were gone. Then I pressed Done so the stitch would load into sewing mode.
I know it doesn’t seem like much and hopefully you’re already thinking of more ways to play. For me, this was a fun challenge to learn a new part of the performance icon. You’ll see below that I ended up mirroring the turtle stitch, going in the opposite direction in my final stitch out than what I had previously set on the screen. I also tried out my stitching and found out it was longer than the strip of fabric I had cut to use; I was able to go in and edit the stitch again, this time reducing the length of the stitching.
While I do like to learn new things, I also like to use what I make in a project. I decided to make myself one more thing for my quilting space – a quilted thread catcher. This would help me use up a few more of my leftover strings and my new stitch samples. Plus, I would have two little coordinating projects for my space!
Today I had fun exploring the Stitch Creator program on the PFAFF performance icon. I think I could spend a lot more time creating with this program!
Be sure to check in tomorrow to learn how to make a coordinating thread catcher to match the pin cushion we made earlier this week.
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